Saturday, December 31, 2016

Inborn Knowledge - Book Review

Colin McGinn’s book Inborn
Knowledge offers a succinct and easy-to-read introduction to what
evolutionary psychologists have known for quite some time: innate concepts are
inherited over generations and knowledge is not re-learned anew with each
individual. I would not, however, classify McGinn’s book as science, much less
as evolutionary or cognitive science. He writes as a philosopher for
philosophers, and that’s where the great value of his book lies. Philosophers
who might resist evolutionary approaches to the human mind will find comfort in
McGinn’s lucid and organized style, discovering that, contrary to what preconceived
notions they might have, biological evolution does not equate to determinism
nor does it eliminate free will and individuality. To a large extent, McGinn
sets out in this very short work to delineate how the brain can help to explain
the mind.

The key question concerns the provenance of ideas. From
early on, McGinn makes clear that his argument will demonstrate how we are born
with ideas, a nativist approach, and that we do not simply acquire ideas from
objects, an empiricist approach. I suppose it’s worth noting that an
evolutionist might quibble with parts of McGinn’s title, once his claim is
staked. It might not be wholly fair or accurate to say that we are born with
knowledge per se, and certainly from a biological perspective any innate
capacities for applying concepts from within the mind to the outside word is
not really a mystery. While McGinn knows his subject, from both the
philosophical and evolutionary sides, I
notice that his bibliography is very light, leans more to philosophy, and
includes Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky, not known as mighty defenders of
evolutionary approaches where continuities are shared among human beings, great
apes, and other primates. But based on my reading of McGinn’s book, he has
absorbed and is able to transmit much scientific thinking not necessarily
represented in his bibliography.

Nativists, or those who see ideas as internal, include
Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz. There is an innate, inner nature. Empiricists,
or those who see ideas as external, include Aristotle, Aquinas, and especially,
Locke. The mind is, according to Locke’s famous dictum, a tabula rasa or blank slate onto which sensations from objects
inscribe ideas. Not surprisingly, McGinn spends much time discussing Locke,
from beginning to end, who insists that all of our knowledge is founded in
experience, in our observation of items external to us. For Locke, the source
of ideas comes from things, from the objects themselves that create subjective
impressions.

McGinn makes a further subtle distinction between internal
and external empiricism. For the internal empiricist, ideas do not depend so
much on external causes but more on our subjective impressions. McGinn says
that Hume might fit into this category. For the external empiricist, however,
ideas indeed stem direct from physical things. For Locke, external objects
generate impressions and ideas on the mind. Therefore everything ideational and
all qualities come down to physical objects. Our interaction with things is
what creates our impressions and ideas. A Cartesian nativist would say ideas
are innate – put there by God. Others might say that ideas derive externally
not from objects but from what others tell us.

There could be combinations of impression/idea-nativism and
idea/impression-empiricism, raising questions about whether innate ideas are
(or not) from external impressions. Locke is a proponent of both ideas and
impressions as rooted in objects. Hume sees impressions as originating from
within the mind. If impressions are internal, and if ideas come from
impressions, then ideas too are internal, notes McGinn. Empiricists would say,
however, that simple and not complex ideas come from the senses. All of this
reminds me of how Emerson says nature is to soul as seal is to print. But while
Emerson is transcendental, Locke is mechanistic. For Locke, there is no mystery
in how ideas are formed. For the nativist, senses help evoke what is innate;
sense does not simply manufacture ideas.

McGinn offers easy examples to follow, but he spends much
time on color, a secondary quality, and the view is a bit anthropocentric. A
chimpanzee does not know the difference between what we call yellow and black,
only that ripe fruit looks a certain way. We don’t need any linguistic labels
to know that a color is different from one we’ve seen before. Understanding is
inborn. As the philosopher Schopenhauer says, perception is the product of
understanding, not sensation. The primate brain knows to avoid putrid looking
food resources. McGinn also talks about where geometric ideas come from and
whether one can have the idea of a triangle by seeing only a straight line. An
empiricist says no but a nativist says yes. I might add that we consider how Homo habilis created stone tools. A
simple idea can become more complex in mind without external stimuli, since the
mind is a maker. Just as there is a straight edge, if one can mentally see a
straight edge in a round stone, the mind has created the tool before it is
physically manufactured.

And of course Australopithecines prior to Homo may have made
tools, so the idea was floating around literally and physically. As only a
philosopher can do, McGinn has a long riff about a brain in a vat and what it’s
capable of or not. But brains did not evolve to be in vats but in bodies in the
world. Of course McGinn knows this; his argument is against ideas stemming only
empirically, for he says that a brain in a vat can be stimulated to have
impressions and to generate ideas. Not until page twenty does McGinn use the
word gene, as a source of ideas, and he does not utter the word evolution or refer
to Darwin until pages thirty six and thirty eight.

I can understand what McGinn says about a purely mental life
of ideas as not necessarily deriving from the physicality of things, but we
evolved to live in and interact with a world of objects, other persons, and
events. Many of our ideas are about things; most of our ideas are about people.
McGinn appears to denigrate ideas coming via social empiricism, but we evolved
to be in large groups. We imitate and learn from others as an adaptive
shortcut. If we tried to have all ideas about everything on our own we’d not
survive. But McGinn seems to focus his anti-empiricist criticism on linguistic
learning. Yet in our evolved past, seen too in other species, there is no need
for grammatical language to interact, perceive, and have ideas. See, for
example, early work done by Wolfgang Köhler
and Robert Yerkes who conducted experiments with great apes. He says, for
instance, “Concepts are detachable from...extraneous conditions” (21). Okay,
maybe so, but that might be abstracting a bit too much from our evolved
capacities and abilities. While we can be philosophical, we did not evolve to
be philosophers. We use ideas to explain things. Using ideas to explain other
ideas is a much more recent development, no doubt.

McGinn finds a contradiction in Locke. Ideas come from
objects themselves but yet secondary qualities like color are projected onto an
object from within the subjective storehouse of the mind. So how, according to
Locke could the mind be a blank slate if it has the inborn ability to color the
world? McGinn says impressions of primary and secondary qualities cannot be
separated, though Locke does so.

McGinn supports Chomsky and how the mind already has the elements
to enable language, but we know Chomsky presents a human uniqueness angle.
McGinn’s point is how stimuli are not potent enough in themselves, in spite of
what empiricists say, to generate ideas. Descartes, he notes, was at least correct
to say how the world is made of scattered bits of information that our mind
assembles. In other words, Locke is wrong to say ideas move wholesale from
objects to minds. McGinn does acknowledge that each species processes the world
differently according to its biological requirements, but no species copies the
external world as idea into the brain.

Concerning the empiricist position, McGinn rightly asks how
we move from the particular to the universal. How does the empiricist account
for abstract ideas? How do we generate large, general ideas from small and
particular things? Empiricists cannot account for such general ideas, only
particular. The empiricist claims that the mind has an ability to abstract, but
that would be innate. McGinn tells us how Locke did not believe animals capable
of mentally abstracting, but that leaves open the problem of why infants do in
fact have ideas, to say nothing of the continuity between us and apes. One
cannot say that particulars give rise to impressions and that the mind later
abstracts because of the particular. The mind can abstract, innately, on its
own.

Empiricists seem to say that the furnishings of
consciousness, not the actual mind itself, come from perceptible particulars in
the world. Consider how from birth all species have intent and agency. Todd Feinberg
and Jon Mallat, in The Ancient Origins of
Consciousness (MIT 2016), have recently demonstrated that sensory
consciousness is widespread across species and evolutionarily very old. Species
evolve to fit into a niche and so have different ways of perceiving the world.
A fish on the bottom of the ocean need not see and so is blind. A bat that
swoops in darkness needs echolocation in spite of blindness. Species evolve
behaviors linked to a consciousness of the environment. McGinn’s point, no
secret to biologists, is that different species’ responses prove their minds
are not blank at birth. But instead of adaptation he uses the odd expression original endowment. The mind is
conscious from birth, and so blank-mind empiricists cannot account for
instincts and drives. In many ways, also not necessarily a new thought,
consciousness across species is cognitive and the mind is inherently working
towards physical and social survival, not on instincts alone. McGinn wonders
why species do not inter-mate (36). That is the subject of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But McGinn
understands that there are species specific and cross species cognitive ideas
about actions built into animal minds.

Darwin comes into McGinn’s picture in terms of inheritance,
and there is quite a nice précis,
including some comments about the adapted mind, beginning on page thirty eight.
I do believe, though, that McGinn should have cued his readers much sooner,
perhaps in his Preface, to his evolutionary leanings. Simply by using, in a
philosophical way, the word nativist in the first thirty five pages is
misleading. McGinn’s affirmation of biology could have been better
foreshadowed. That the book makes an essentially scientific claim means some of
its grounding ideas could have been cataloged sooner. Nods to Descartes and
others might confuse readers into thinking there is, in fact, creative
evolution.

The pillars of Darwin’s natural selection are variation,
competition, and inheritance. There is no spiritus
mundi, no élan vital, and nothing mysterious. McGinn spends
a little time on variation when he talks about individuality, ignores
competition, but does cover inheritance. Locke and Hume think consciousness but
not its content is innate; contents are acquired and accumulate. Knowledge can
vary across cultures over time but there is an innate mental structure for
cultural knowledge. Some knowledge is acquired and becomes a memory. There is
other knowledge we are born with, such as the concepts of addition and
subtraction. The nature of mind is that
it is both innate and acquired: the external environment of objects, places,
and events only stimulates the mind to form impressions. Why should we be
surprised to find intelligence, emotions, and sentience in other animals?

At this point in his discussion McGinn claims that nativism
is unintelligible and a mystery (60-61). But it is not. On his
bibliography, while he includes Pinker, he cites The Language Instinct but not How
the Mind Works. Without going down the list, there are a number of
cognitive or evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists who could have been
marshaled to demonstrate how this is not a mystery. Granted the author says,
early on, he does not want to write a heavily researched book, but credible
backing would have helped his claims about why knowledge is innate and how this
is physically and evolutionarily so. I suppose, though, one of the virtues of
McGinn’s book is its simple directness.

Essentially, McGinn is circumventing the so-called hard
problem. Certainly, how do consciousness and thought arise from molecules? That
too has been addressed by, among others, Feinberg and Mallat. By using the word
mystery McGinn is making somewhat supernatural a natural process that has
evolved over time, much as the complexity of the eye has evolved from a simple
photoreceptor cell. Like his delay to invoke evolution, this language undercuts
his central argument. We know apes have ideas of things. Chimpanzees and orangutans
will try to figure out how something mechanical works. Creationists make a
special case for human uniqueness, so how then to explain theory of mind and
intelligence of apes. Why would God have made a chimpanzee as smart as a
four-year-old child? McGinn relies here on Chomsky who claims human uniqueness
in terms of language, but meantime apes can use and understand our sign
language, so say nothing about their own sophisticated forms of bodily and
vocal communication.

And why would the inheritance of ideas, according to McGinn,
be any more mysterious? Consider how mating preferences that require mentality
get passed on. It is not only instinctual but cultural, seen too in the
generational evolution of bird songs. He says that “Thinking is not an organic
process...”(65). But has not that been his whole argument, the organic nature
of the mind? Thinking and consciousness are organic, because when one dies they
stop. McGinn might be looking for answers not so much in gene coding but in
gene switching, so-called junk DNA. So while we are ninety-nine percent similar
to chimpanzees genetically, there is a massive amount of switching genes that
accounts, perhaps, for our significant differences. This does not make us
special, only different in how the ecological niche we have filled is much
larger and required new forms of gene expression. In others words, it’s not a
supernatural mystery. There really is no mind/body problem, as he suggests (70)
since the mind is part of the body, almost as one. The brain in the vat is
still embodied – eighty five billion neural cells and a trillion or so neural
connections are as one body.

McGinn’s book is a valuable primer for philosophers who are
interested in non-metaphysical theories about the mind. Because of its small size
and limited scope, there is much not covered, including mutation, drift, and
sexual or social selection. There is no mention of cultural evolution, also an
important component related to primate evolution. There are many hominid and
hominin species that have not survived. This does not give us or chimpanzees
special status. On average, Neanderthals had brains larger than ours. Adaptations
are a matter of selection pressures. At some point near the end of the book
McGinn talks about human nature, but such terminology can be problematic. We
have not been so created, with a human nature. Rather, we have evolved, and
have survived over other species like ours, in a way that seems to make us
appear to have a human nature. While there are continuities across species,
there is also something distinct about a species. We human beings are a
composite of multiple dimensions of evolution that have channeled adaptations
from all our preceding primate ancestors and organisms before them.

Towards the end of the book McGinn suggests an important
point that needs more emphasis in today’s culture. Many great ideas in human history are
completely external but have become manifest through innate, inherited parts,
what Michael Tomasello would call the ratchet effect. Scientific thinking,
then, is not wholly objective but contains at least a soupçon of innate ideas.
Just as we need philosophers like McGinn to shed scientific light on
philosophy, we need scientists to acknowledge how some big ideas come from
within, contrary to a purely scientific method. That is, there is a certain
amount of creativity and imagination involved in scientific thinking. McGinn
handily covers this by noting how we are “born referring” (88). Reference is
built into us (or at least the ability) and not dependent on external stimulus.
We can make complex ideas from basic, innate ideas. And in reverse, as McGinn
proves, an able writer can render complex ideas through history understandable.

1 comment:

I don't think I'll be seeking out this title. I found your analytic comments/corrections much more cogent and compelling than those in McGinn's text as you summarize it. (For my part, I believe the Wm. James / Adelbert Ames Jr.line that "We see what we expect to see," or "We see what we expect to do with it," to be true, and a compass pointing us toward better ways to approach some of the questions that McGinn looks at here.) In this context I particularly like your off-hand remark, "Since the mind is a maker." (Yours or a quotation I don't recognize?)

I would however take exception to (or more precisely, suggest a different angle of viewing) your comment, "We did not evolve to be philosophers." (Just today, coincidentally, I read in Siri Hustvedt's essay "The Delusions of Certainty" her comment [offered with apparent certainty] "Nobody is born a philosopher.") I believe some of us did exactly that. We all have experience with those who clearly have been born with the mental/physical (inseparable, yes) gifts that allow them to more easily and more completely master a chosen field of human culture than the rest of us might. That is, some are "born to be" atheletes, some to be composers, some to extend mathematical logic. Only those with the most profound of these gifts reach (even define) the pinnacles of their professions. The rest of us are Salieris, and yet, and yet . . . we soldier on, because we, too, feel we were "born to" a field and find our fullest engagement and satisfaction there. If we take this seriously as a kind of evolution-to-niche, some strange, almost Sci-Fi (or, perhaps, comic?) questions emerge: Are those who are "all-thumbs" in this world better seen as experts whose fields have yet to appear? Are there fields/artifacts that have yet to manifest themselves because those with the "born to" gifts to create them have not yet been born? (I'm not speaking of the individual "genius"---who rarely if ever is a solitary anyway.)

Do you know of anyone looking into, writing about this subject at all?

Anyway, Thanks again for taking part of your New Year's Eve to post this review.